It is a truism that since the day of Plato’s _Republic_ no subject
has had such widespread discussion as has that of the proper form of
government. It is equally a truism that if imitation is the sincerest
flattery, the hundreds of written constitutions that have sprung up
since 1789 attest the belief that America has successfully put into
practical form the theories of democracy. Yet a minority has always
questioned whether democracy is after all the panacea for political
evils, and recent writers like Mr. Lecky, have but given expression
to a somewhat widespread feeling of uncertainty as to the permanent
success of democratic institutions.
It is noteworthy, however, that the discussion of democracy has
been confined to the field of politics, and that its adaptation
to educational institutions, where presumably a high grade of
intelligence, education, opportunity and experience seem to offer the
greatest promise of success, is never publicly discussed, much less in
this country practiced.[20]
* * * * *
It is equally anomalous that in Europe, with its tendency to monarchy
in the state, there is found absolute democracy in the government of
educational institutions, while America, democratic in the state,
furnishes the most extreme illustration of absolute monarchy in the
government of its educational institutions. It seems, if possible, even
more strange that American college students have for years been going
to European universities, and yet apparently have paid no attention
to questions of educational organization. It can only be explained
by the general lack of information and interest in the management of
educational institutions.
The UNPOPULAR REVIEW is not a fitting place for the discussion of
questions concerning the college, if frequent discussion means
popularity: for the fashionable question in the serious periodical of
the day is “What’s the matter with the colleges?” But while there is
absolute agreement that _something_ is the matter, every diagnostician
has his own explanation. Athletics, the curriculum, the classics,
vocational training, and every part of the educational system unable to
speak for itself, have been held responsible for the existing evils. It
may, however, be sufficiently unpopular for a mere college professor
to say that in his humble opinion at least one thing the matter with
the college is its form of government, and that here is an interesting
place in which to test democracy before abandoning it as hopeless.
Certainly these opinions have been so unpopular as to lead many who
honestly hold them to hesitate to state them. When they are stated, it
is generally by those not within the academic pale.
One of the most serious evils in the situation is that it is impossible
for those most concerned to meet and discuss it openly. More than one
important article has come from a college professor, but it has been
anonymous because it is out of the question for him to write freely
of the position in which he is placed. If he openly questions the
present system, he is called “a sorehead,” “a knocker,” and “a kicker.”
Every discussion of the administrative department of the university
is interpreted as “an attack on the president.” To publish a doubt
of the wisdom of concentrating all authority in him, is regarded
as “attacking the administration.” It is at least significant that
in the great work on _University Control_[21] the opinions of two
hundred and ninety-nine members of college faculties are anonymous,
while a bare half-dozen are published under the names of men holding
academic positions at the time of writing. Academic freedom is usually
interpreted as meaning the right of speaking freely about matters
and things in general, including the trusts, anarchy, socialism,
prohibition, the control of public utilities by municipal, state,
or federal agencies, and kindred subjects, but never about academic
organization. That freedom of expression for which Wycliffe and the
Lollard movement stood in England, Luther in Germany, Calvin in
France--albeit his ecclesiastical followers in this country may have
wandered far from his ideas--that movement for freedom led in Europe
by great university men, when it comes to discussion of educational
organization has, by the irony of fate, been denied to their heirs in
America to-day.
It is easy to trace the path by which monarchy in education has
been reached. When education was largely controlled by the Church,
students were educated by the Church, and for the Church. Educational
institutions, as a part of the Church, were governed as the Church was
governed. Implicit obedience was given superiors, not as educators,
but as members of the Church. We have inherited from mediæval times a
condition of educational organization that was the natural outgrowth of
this organization, but we have perpetuated it in an age when education
is controlled by the State, which has itself become democratic.
The result is a tug-o’-war between the monarchical organization of
education, and the democratic spirit that permeates the vast body of
educators and educated.
It is also easy to see the immediate steps by which we have arrived
at the present situation. The institution with which the writer is
connected had fewer than two hundred regular college students when he
first became a member of the faculty. It has shared in the enormous
development of such institutions all over the country, and its students
now number more than a thousand. Yet in all this time, the method of
government has not changed. In the early days it was convenient for the
president to decide every question, and this system has been continued,
even though the student body has increased more than five fold, and
the instructing body in the same proportion. In spite of changed
conditions everywhere, this plan has been perpetuated, and has often
been legalized by boards of trustees.
Thus, by both remote and immediate inheritance, education, in its
organization, has arrived at absolute monarchy, with all its attending
evils,--evils that affect the university as a whole and all of its
separate and individual parts.
One obvious evil is the confusion everywhere found in the academic
world between legislation and administration. The normal plan in a
political democracy--an administrative body that carries out the wishes
of the legislative body--is reversed in education. The legislative
and the executive departments may be combined, and the executive
made responsible to the legislative, as in England, or they may be
independent, as in America; but it is only in an absolute monarchy
that the administrative body both legislates and administers its own
legislation. The university has thus allied itself with absolute
monarchy rather than with democracy.
Another element of confusion is found in the anomalous conditions of
citizenship. Educational citizenship within a faculty, attaches to the
position, not to the individual. A man is appointed to a professorship
in a faculty, and _ipso facto_ he acquires full citizenship in that
body, with power to vote immediately on every question submitted to
it. Yet the faculty may list as “instructors” no small proportion of
its members who have been connected with it many years, yet they have
no share in the government of the institution. They are in a state of
indeterminate probation, and are often never admitted to the privileges
of full citizenship in the governing body.
Confusion also grows out of the application to the government of
the university, of the unit vote long ago abandoned in the federal
government. In the New England Confederation, the experiment was
tried of giving equal representation to each colony, regardless of
its population. This proved unsatisfactory, and subsequent plans of
union attempted to square the circle by increasing the number of
representatives, but giving each colony only one vote. After this in
its turn proved ill-advised, the whole system was thrown overboard,
and a “one man, one vote” principle adopted. In college legislation
has either theory or experience shown any necessity for reverting to
an antiquated political custom, and requiring that the unit rule shall
prevail and each department have one vote but only one vote?
The most disturbing factor in the situation is that all questions
concerning the actual government in a university are decided, not by
the faculty itself, but by an external board of trustees; that this
body, rather than the faculty, is ultimately and legally responsible
for all legislation affecting the university; and that it transfers
this responsibility to the president of the institution whom it
itself appoints. If it is suggested that the faculty is the natural
legislative body in an educational institution, and that this body
should determine all matters of educational policy, objections are
immediately interposed.
The first objection is the alleged incompetence of a faculty to
legislate. But it may well be asked how often matters of genuine
legislation are even submitted to it. Some years ago a university
president was elected, and the special correspondent of a great
metropolitan daily sent it a two-column account of his probable policy.
“All over America,” he writes, “the question is being asked: ‘What
are President X’s views? What is he likely to do with the elective
courses? What with requirements for admission? What with the different
departments of the University, re-modelling the scheme which now
runs through each in a confused way? What with university extension?
The compulsory chapel, and the college pastorate questions, and the
complicated problems of undergraduate and general intercollegiate
athletics?’” Yet every one of these questions represented as being
asked “all over America” concerns not the administrative office
of a university president, but the legislative department of the
institution. Whether a faculty is or is not a failure as a legislative
body, can be only a matter of conjecture until the experiment has had a
fair trial.
A variant of this objection is that “college faculties can not do
business.” To this it may be said parenthetically that a faculty has
little opportunity except to fritter away its time, when a college
president refuses to submit an agenda to it, and thus enable it to do
its business in a business-like way. But every great university numbers
among its faculty those who have from time to time been asked to render
service to the state or to the community, and this service has been
rendered in an acceptable, even a distinguished, manner. In the fields
of diplomacy, finance, organized philanthropy, municipal affairs, the
college professor is everywhere being requisitioned by the state as
a consulting expert, or asked to render it temporary active service.
Yet many of these prophets are without honor in their own country,
in that no opportunity is ever given them to suggest improvements in
the business administration of their own institutions, or to confer
officially on educational policy with the representatives of other
faculties. Thus the powers of the faculty are being atrophied through
lack of use, while the college, in the midst of abundance, suffers from
poverty of nourishment.
It is also urged that faculties are not interested in general
educational policies, since each member is primarily concerned with
his own special department. This too is a matter of conjecture until
the statement has been tested by experience. It may, however, readily
be granted that not all members of every faculty are interested in
educational legislation. But this is true in the state, and yet it
is not used as an argument either for disfranchising voters, or for
refusing them the franchise. Rather, is every voter urged to do his
political duty, and vote, and every alien urged to take out his
naturalization papers, and as speedily as may be become a voting
citizen.
The fear has also been expressed that if faculties were given increased
legislative powers, the result would be confusion in the consideration
of educational problems. This fear in its turn seems certainly not
well grounded. It is seldom expressed with reference to the political
system, yet if danger exists anywhere, it is assuredly there, and not
in the college world. What education needs above everything else,
is all the wisdom that can be contributed to it by the experience,
intelligence, observation, and theory of every person connected with
it. The result would assuredly be, not confusion, but enlightenment. A
recent examination of the academic career of the members of a single
college faculty, shows that they have been connected either as students
or officers with nearly two hundred different institutions in this
country or in Europe. This history is doubtless repeated in every other
institution, showing what a wealth of academic experience and knowledge
the college has never yet turned to account. It is generally believed
that the great work of the trained mind is to utilize the forces of
nature, and make them do its bidding, to harness fire, water, air,
electricity, and to reap the advantages of the power multiplied by
these means. But no effort is made to utilize the educational forces
that lie dormant in a college faculty, and to multiply a hundred fold
the educational forces now used. The question may at least be raised
whether some fraction of the confusion found in the educational system
may not be due to the failure to bring to bear upon it the clarifying
power of college and university faculties. Investigation has found an
outlet in every field except that of education itself.
The fear was once expressed by Edward Thring lest in any scheme for the
organization of education “the skilled workman engaged in the highest
kind of skilled work should be deliberately and securely put under
the amateur in perpetuity.”[22] This fear is not unwarranted in its
application to America. As long as college and university trustees are
for the most part chosen from business interests, they naturally assume
that college officers must “want something” in the way of personal
advantage when they discuss the disadvantages of the present system of
academic government. They do not understand that what college officers
wish is not personal gain, but simply freedom of opportunity to serve
the college to the limit of their powers, and that this opportunity
must include a controlling voice in the educational legislation of the
institutions with which they are connected, and in the formulation
of the laws governing their own actions as legislating bodies. The
members of college faculties seem justified in thinking that they
are now deprived of all the broadening and deepening influences that
come from sharing the responsibilities of the larger affairs of
education. They are parts of a machine irresponsible for its final
results: the planning, the direction, the thinking are all done by
the administrative head. Were the duties of a college professor such
as those of a letter carrier, a policeman, a snow shoveler, a brick
layer, or a day laborer, it would be a simple thing to regulate his
hours of work, his pay, his vacation, and his uniform. But the more
complex the duties of any person, the more difficult the regulation of
them by an external authority. The more serviceable any person to any
organization, the more must he have freedom of thought, judgment, and
action.
The further questions also arise--Does a university officer sustain
the same relation to the president, or the board of trustees, that a
minister does to the ministry, or that a diplomatic officer does to his
government, or to the government to which he is accredited? Are college
officers to be paid employees, or to be co-operators in the government
of the college? If the former, then certainly military discipline must
prevail. Men in high business or financial circles do not allow their
employees to go about openly discussing or criticizing the way they
conduct their business. But if college officers are to be co-operators
in determining the educational policy of the institution with which
they are connected, what is needed is not keeping them under army
discipline, but the encouragement of frank discussion with them and by
them of all matters pertaining to the welfare of the institution, and
of education in all its largest aspects.
The situation may be confused by the custom of choosing the college
president from the ranks of the clergy; the clergyman-president
naturally believes that since his relations to his congregation have
been those of an expert in theology to those who are ignorant of it,
his relations to a college faculty must be similar. He forgets that
he has to deal with those who are themselves experts, each in his own
field, and that they are also presumably interested in the general
field of education, and acquainted with it.
It may be that college authorities intend to encourage college
faculties to discuss with them questions of educational policy; but
if so, the intention has not been made with sufficient emphasis to
be clearly understood. “We are clerks in a dry goods store, the dean
is the floor walker and the president is the proprietor,” is the way
the situation has been put by a well-known university professor. The
college professor sometimes feels that while, before the law, a man is
innocent until he is proved guilty, in the college world faculties
are guilty until they can prove themselves innocent, and their normal
attitude thus becomes one of defense against an unseen power.
The results of all this confusion between the legislative and the
administrative departments in academic government are unfortunate for
all concerned. Destructive criticism will always prevail, and will sap
the vitality of any institution that denies to its members the right of
constructive action, while external government leads to the spirit and
attitude of externalism,--the members of the teaching body of a college
rarely say “we,” but refer politely to the institution with which they
are connected as “the college.” The impression is sometimes carried
away from an educational assembly, that the profession of teaching
has not attracted many brilliant college graduates. Will mediocre men
continue to seek the teaching profession, while men of independence
of judgment and character continue to shun a profession which offers
little scope for their abilities? “What science and practical life
alike need, is not narrow men, but broad men sharpened to a point,”
writes President Butler, and this admirably expresses the great need in
education,--a need difficult to be met as long as present conditions
remain. It is a grave question whether the college professor is to
continue an automaton, or to become an initial force.
The chief administrative officer of the college has come to be
considered the college; in his own eyes, and in the eye of the public,
he _is_ the college; he is the only person considered competent or
authorized to represent it; and it is his view that is to prevail in
all matters of educational policy.
Now with the college president as an individual, the college professor
has no quarrel. He often counts him among his warmest friends, and his
personal relations with him are often cordial, and even intimate. But
this is quite compatible with a strong and conscientious belief based
on a study of facts and conditions, that the organization of the
college presidency is an anomaly in a democratic state. The college
professor may perhaps recognize the justice of the administration
of the president _per se_, even when it takes such extreme form as
regulations that members of a faculty are not permitted to invite
anyone to speak to their classes without authorization from the
president; that they cannot be absent from a class without getting
permission from the president; that sudden illness, accident, or
unforeseen emergency that has involved absence, must be reported; when
the president gives permission to accept an invitation to lecture
at another university but with the proviso that it does not involve
absence from class, or that the request be not repeated during the
academic year, or with the reminder that a professor’s first duty
is to his own college; when it is the president who passes on the
propriety of a professor’s wearing a golf suit in the lecture room,
and who sometimes decides the question of wearing caps and gowns on
commencement day. The objection of the college professor lies less in
the nature of the rules and regulations prescribed than in the manner
of the prescription. He sometimes wonders why he could not be trusted
to legislate on some of these questions, and why it is so difficult for
the president to realize that a professor may take an active interest
in educational affairs, without having his eye on the presidency.
The professor realizes that the president is not always to be blamed
for present conditions,--often he is himself the victim of a system
he has had no part in creating, and forces that he cannot control
apparently compel him to perpetuate it. Yet blame must be attached to
him for defending it, and for refusing to discuss with his colleagues
the possibility of modifying it. He seems equally remiss in not
presenting the whole question of college government to the board of
trustees, and pointing out to them the incongruities and anomalies
of the present situation. The professor realizes that the president
has a hard time of it--Does he not hear it at every educational
convention?--but he always wonders if it is inevitable. He sometimes
remembers an illustrated lecture given by the representative of a great
manufacturing company, showing its organization and workings. One slide
represented in graphic form its early organization; it was a pyramid
trying to maintain stable equilibrium on its apex, and the apex was the
president supporting on his shoulders the solid mass of the employees.
Another slide represented the same pyramid on its base, and the apex,
in its natural position, was the smiling face of the president.
Underneath was the legend “It pays.” If the organization of a great
business enterprise has gained in strength and stability, and has found
that “it pays” in dollars and cents as well as in comfort and peace
of mind, to have the responsibility for conducting it shared by all
connected with it, would not a similar organization “pay” the college?
As a result of recent outbreaks on Blackwell’s Island, the Commissioner
of Corrections went among the inmates to learn the causes of their
grievances, and with the same end in view called to the office a
half-dozen of the most intelligent convicts, and invited them to state
all their complaints. It is not on record that a college president
or board of trustees has talked over causes of dissatisfaction with
educational conditions, or has invited the members of the faculty
to state their views. Is it possible that some pointers on academic
government may be gained from a method employed in a modern penal
institution?
It is conceivable that such a plan might also pay in dollars and
cents. In one college it took nine years to get a requisition signed
for a small improvement needed to relieve the officers working in the
building from undue anxiety for the care of the property; and the total
cost involved was six dollars. During these nine years the college
treasurer was on record as saying that it cost three thousand dollars a
year to enforce the compulsory attendance at chapel prescribed by the
board of trustees. Would some conference between trustees, president,
and faculty have resulted in a better showing on the treasurer’s books?
If the present system has entailed endless confusion in the relations
between the legislative and the administrative departments of the
college, it has resulted in equally anomalous conditions in the
administrative department itself. Some years ago, when a gentleman
distinguished in the educational field was chosen president of a
university, a member of another faculty remarked, “It seems a great
misfortune, does it not, that he should be made president: he has done
so much for education, and now of course he will have to give up all
that work.”
Nor are members of college faculties alone in thinking that the office
of president is overweighted. At the time of the election of a certain
university president, the alumni of the institution put themselves on
record as believing “that the presidential prerogative has increased,
is increasing, and ought to be diminished.” In this opinion, probably
the majority of every faculty in every college and university in the
country would concur.
Many college professors are restive not only because “the presidential
prerogative has increased,” but also because they are called on to
expend much mental and physical energy in preserving the prerogative.
The offense of _lèse-majesté_ has become almost as criminal in the
educational as in the political world. They are restive because the
presidential office is overweighted, and the result as regards the
administration, is to develop that most pernicious of all forms of
government,--a bureaucracy. They are restive because of their inability
to remedy conditions not of their own making. Some of these are
financial, and a college instructor once put the matter thus: “Our
president has created conditions whereby we have an annual deficit of
about $20,000. This deficit is met by the chairman of the board of
trustees, and the president must stand in with him. The faculty are
in a hole,--they must hang on to the president, and he must hang on
to the board of trustees, and they must hang on to their chairman,
and trust him to pull everybody out.” Some of these conditions are
educational. Wisdom seems to be attached to the office of president,
rather than to the individual filling it. A man may be made president
because he is known to be a good business man and an able executive
officer, and _ipso facto_ he becomes an expert on all educational
questions. Progress in all educational matter must be halted while
the excellent executive is familiarizing himself with the A B C of
education, and perhaps in time learning how large the subject is.
Many professors are discouraged because, while the same tendency
towards autocratic government has been seen in the political world,
the reaction against it is already noted. The power of the speaker of
the House of Representatives that gained the title of “czar” for one
incumbent, has already been modified by the rules of the House. But the
college professor sees nothing on the educational horizon that portends
a change for the better. Every week he reads somewhere the well-known
account of the first official meeting between a president of Harvard
University and his faculty. When changes were proposed, and some of
the faculty reasoned why these things must be, the president replied,
“Because, gentlemen, you have a new president.” The professor always
wonders if anything like it ever happens when a university acquires a
new member of the faculty; he wonders why this vivid description of
professors rubbing their eyes in amazement at the statement of their
new master, should give such pleasure to the press and to the public;
and he wonders if the spirit of it has not blossomed in the most recent
authoritative statement of the place of the university president as it
is understood by the president himself.[23]
The professor is discouraged because, although, in the present
organization of the educational system, a president is considered
necessary, the supply of presidents never equals the demand. So varied
and numerous are the qualifications insisted upon, that when a person
is found approaching the desired standard, he is sought for every
vacancy. Several well-known professors have for a number of years
been “mentioned” in connection with every presidency vacant, and as a
society belle is said to boast of the number of desirable offers of
marriage she has refused, so the professor, or more often his wife,
makes known the number of presidencies that he has declined. The
professor wonders why one or more of our great universities, in this
age of vocational training, does not establish a training school for
presidents. But this in its turn leads to the query how the supply of
students in such a school could be maintained.
The professor is discouraged because of the difficulty of “getting at
things.” The question of college government involves the relation of
the boards of control to the president and the faculty, the relation of
the president to the faculty, on the one hand, and to the student body
on the other, with the result that the president becomes the official
medium of communication between the governing body and the faculty.
This triangular arrangement can but be productive of lack of harmony,
and of constant misunderstandings; and its evils fall upon trustees,
president, faculty, students, and alumni. The trustees nominally
exercise an authority that is virtually given over to the president,
the office of president is overweighted, the faculty are left without
responsibility, as are the students in their turn, and the alumni
are often in ignorance of what the policy of the college is, while
everybody is exhorted to be “loyal to the college” without any clear
understanding of what loyalty to the college means, or even indeed just
what “the college” means. He sometimes wonders if the Duke of York’s
gardener was anticipating present academic conditions in America, when
he instructed his servants,
“Go, bind thou up yond dangling apricocks,
Which, like unruly children, make their sire
Stoop with oppression of their prodigal weight;
Give some supportance to the bending twigs.
Go thou, and like an executioner
Cut off the heads of too-fast growing sprays,
That look too lofty in our commonwealth;
All must be even in our government.”
Yet after all ’tis a good world, my masters! The professor is not
wholly downcast. If he does not know by name, without consulting
the catalogue, a third of the members of the board of trustees that
controls his academic destiny; if he does not know by sight a fourth of
them, and if he has never exchanged comments on the weather with more
than a fifth of them, he at least hopes that the sixth of the board who
may chance, through the college catalogue, to know of his connection
with the institution, may not feel unkindly toward him. He can only
plead in extenuation of his rashness in suggesting a more democratic
form of academic government, his strong conviction that only as _all_
parts of the educational structure are strengthened, can the structure
approach perfection, and serve the end for which it has been erected.